Jame Gumb

Jame Gumb (25 October 1949-1988), better known as "Buffalo Bill", was an American serial killer who claimed the lives of six overweight women and his former lover Benjamin Raspail. Gumb gained his nickname for skinning them (as Buffalo Bill had claimed to have scalped a Cheyenne warrior) in order to make a female suit of skin when Johns Hopkins University refused to allow him to go through a sex reassignment surgery. He was killed in 1988 by FBI agent Clarice Starling.

Biography
Jame Gumb was born on 25 October 1949 in California to an alcoholic prostitute. She misspelled "James" on his birth certificate, and his legal name was "Jame". She later abandoned him and he was taken into foster care at the age of two, having a traumatic childhood with years of systematic abuse. Until the age of ten, he spent years in foster homes, and his grandparents adopted him. He murdered his grandparents in 1959 to see what it felt like, and he was sent to the Tulare Vocational Rehabilitation psychiatric hospital, becoming a tailor. He had a relationship with a man named Benjamin Raspail, but when Raspail left him for a new lover named Klaus, Gumb killed and flayed Klaus.

Gumb wanted to become a woman through sex reassignment surgery, but Johns Hopkins University and the other medical centers refused to let him go through the surgery due to him being too disturbed. In the 1980s he was responsible for the killing and skinning of five overweight women, hanging them in the first three cases. His first victim, Fredrica Bimmel, was weighed down so that she was the third one found to throw off authorities. Gumb was nicknamed "Buffalo Bill" because he skinned his victims. By 1988, he had killed five women. The Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI's director Jack Crawford sent FBI trainee Clarice Starling to find out as much about Buffalo Bill as she could both by communication with incarcerated cannibal Hannibal Lecter and by investigating other leads. Gumb killed a sixth woman at a Memphis, Tennessee motel after pretending that he was injured while loading a couch into his truck. He put a Death's Head Moth into her mouth before putting her into a river in West Virginia. Starling located the severed head of Benjamin Raspail in Baltimore at an old storage facility, the Your Self Storage, and she later located the body of his sixth female victim.

Gumb planned to have a seventh victim when he kidnapped Catherine Martin, the daughter of junior senator from Tennessee Ruth Martin, and ignored a video plea from Senator Martin to spare her daughter. He kept her in a well in the basement of his home in Belvedere, Ohio, starving her until her skin would be easy to remove for his suit. Eventually, the FBI tracked him down with the help of Starling and the indirect help of Lecter (who gave answers in riddles to Starling and the others). The FBI found out his name and raided his home in Illinois, but found it to only be a business address, and he was not there. However, Starling located him while in Belvedere after talking with the family of Fredrica Bimmel, accidentally locating him while trying to interview him. He ran downstairs, and Starling searched around for him. Gumb turned off the power and used his night vision goggles to come up behind her. However, as he was about to shoot her, Starling heard his footsteps and shot in his direction several times. Gumb shot multiple bullets, but all missed; Starling hit him several times in the chest, and he died in a short moment after some breathing trouble. He had murdered at least 9 people (his grandparents, his six female victims, and Raspail) in his life.